On the road to driverless cars

Driverless cars are poised to begin transforming the nation’s roadways before the end of the decade, a major transportation group said Wednesday, but a top federal transportation official warned things might not be so easy.

The Eno Center for Transportation released a paper that predicted a nation full of driverless “autonomous” vehicles could save $447 billion and 21,700 lives annually by preventing 4.2 million crashes and reducing fuel consumption by 724 million gallons. Still, switching from highways full of drivers to highways full of computers won’t be simple.

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“We’re looking at the introduction of AVs by the end of the decade,” Daniel Fagnant, the paper’s author, said at an event Wednesday.

The switch to autonomous vehicles comes with enough potential benefits to make transportation policymakers giddy. Computers don’t get drunk, fall asleep or get distracted by text messages. They can stay a precise distance away from the car in front of them, reducing time and fuel wasted by congestion.

The headache comes in getting there. While interest from major technology and transportation players, like Google and Nissan, shows the technology may not be far away, the nation’s laws are designed for the current system in which a driver is responsible for a car when he’s behind the wheel. AVs disrupt that system, something Legislatures in California and three other states have begun to address.

“The technology, I think, takes a back seat to some of these policy issues,” said Mary Lynn Tischer, director of transportation policy studies at the Federal Highway Administration.

Tischer cited the concerns about how a fleet mixed with both autonomous and regular automobiles would work, and whether the public or private sector should take the lead on making a transition. The federal government may need to bring automakers, technology companies and state transportation departments together to create a framework for the future, she added.

Cost remains the other big barrier at the moment. Autonomous cars designed by Google use $70,000 worth of equipment, and it will take years for those prices to drop significantly. The earliest buyers can expect to spend at least $10,000 more per vehicle, though that is expected to eventually fall to $3,000, according to the paper.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who are employed driving automobiles, including taxi drivers and truckers, may also present another barrier to AV adoption.

“Anytime you’re looking at replacing a human job with an automated job, there’s going to be substantial opposition,” Fagnant said.

The introduction of AVs will most likely increase a growing number of Americans who live “car-light” lifestyles using applications like Car2Go and Zipcar, Fagnant said. If AVs control 90 percent of the market, he projected, the overall automobile fleet will shrink more than 40 percent.

The paper recommends increasing federal research funding for AVs and calls for the Department of Transportation to develop a model for licensing drivers of AVs, and the establishment of standards for liability, security and privacy.